[SciPy-dev] Scipy workflow (and not tools).

[Mike Hansen]

On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 1:13 PM, Charles R Harris
<charlesr.harris at gmail.com> wrote:
> I don't think there are enough eyes at this point for a strict review
> policy. How many of the current packages have any maintainer? Who was
> maintaining the stats package before Josef got involved? How many folks
> besides Robert could look over the changes usefully? How many folks looked
> over Travis' recent addition to optimize?  Who is working on the
> interpolation package?
>
> I think at this point we would be better off trying to recruit at least one
> person to "own" each package. For new packages that is usually the person
> who committed it but we also need ownership of older packages. Someone with
> a personal stake in a package is likely to do more for quality assurance at
> this point than any amount of required review.

It doesn't seem your current process is conducive to have a
"maintainer" for each package.  What is the maintainer supposed to do?
 Monitor all the relevant SVN commits hoping that some broken,
untested change doesn't go in behind his or her back?

With a review process, maintainers emerge since code doesn't get
included if they don't.  You also get a lot more people knowledgeable
about more areas of the codebase.

I think Stefan's comment should be reiterated:

> Having so little time means that we cannot be cavalier about adding
> broken code to SciPy.  Like Matthew mentioned, this becomes an immense
> maintenance burden.

--Mike